Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday November 29, 2012 @01:51PM
from the and-for-his-next-trick dept.

eldavojohn writes "Mojang's Marcus Persson (better known as 'Notch') has answered quite a few questions in an interview with PC Gamer about his new game 0x10c. Since its announcement, there's been very few details about game play aside from the DCPU-16 and art tests. But in this interview, Notch has revealed quite a bit about how the game will function and non-final ideas he has for either a monthly fee to play in a 'multiverse' or micropayments. He talks about a custom OS people are working on to load into the game's CPU as well as a an in-game 3D printer that will allow you to make virtual objects. When asked about Kickstarter and his Oculus dev kit, Notch said 'Definitely going to make it work in 0x10c no matter what' and his account of using the Oculus Rift sounds more than promising for the VR Device. When asked about Linux he said, '[Linux] is wonderful. I think we need to have it, and it's a shame that more people, including myself, don't use it. It's gotten easier and friendlier.' When asked about Microsoft he said, 'I use their OS – Windows 7 is an amazing operating system in my opinion and of course there's the Xbox, which I love. I'm sure Bing is going to take off and save them. [Editor's note: Notch is smiling mischievously as he says this.]'"

0x10c sounds like a game that geeks (like me) would make if they didn't have financial constraints. I doubt it will reach any kind of mass market appeal and the hoards of minecraft fans hanging on Notch's every word will probably be dissapointed. But I'm looking forward to it.

So first off, nothing is truly finalized yet. Mojang is not some big EA game maker that had a deadline and forces it to happen regardless of how ready the game is or isn't. Instead, according to the interview they have two developers working on 0x10c right now and it sounds like Notch and company are still playing around with a lot of cool ideas. The pricing and revenue streams aren't even cemented yet!

So from the story part of the page you said you skimmed [0x10c.com] there were sleep chambers that screwed up little endian with big endian and put everyone to sleep for 1 0000 0000 0000 years and now it's 281 474 976 712 644 AD and the first people are starting to wake up. You've got an extremely sparse universe with black holes and lots of empty space.

Now according to the interview the first release will consist only of "you can build a ship and you can play with the computer components in it." And you can design the ship, lay it out more efficiently, etc. However, "Each ship has a generator capable of producing a fixed wattage, and everything you connect to it drains wattage. A cloaking field, for example, might require almost all the power from the generator, forcing you to turn off all computers and dim all lights in order to successfully cloak. The computer in the game is a fully functioning emulated 16 bit CPU that can be used to control your entire ship, or just to play games on while waiting for a large mining operation to finish." So you're going to have to manage your resources and Notch mentions Faster Than Light (a game I kickstarted and enjoyed).

He also alludes to the possibility of your ship flying around and searching for things, a 3D printer, planetary exploration and that kind of stuff. They're not too clear on how multiplayer will work but it sounds like it's going to mostly be a crew on the same ship. Notch talks about 'launching all nukes at space stations' when he's leading and so it sounds like you'll interact with things outside your ship (probably through your DCPU-16).

It sounds like a lot of these ideas are half baked like the 3D printer that he described:

The idea is that, with things like turrets, you have a 3D printer to build the shell, like a computer case shell, but you still have to put components in there. Players in the game aren’t really engineers – they’re more like pilots, so they can’t build those parts. You have to scavenge for those parts, and find abandoned ships and try to find a working CPU or something. And those could have slightly different attributes: you might find a CPU running at 105% and try to trade that. But you can also mine for basic resources, like if you want a gold computer case – we’ll see if we actually have different materials, but that’s what I want – you have to mine for gold and put it in the 3D printer.

But I'm really excited for this game, even if it is just a Faster Than Light type game where you build a spaceship and outfit it and attack or aid outside ships. You would fight intruders that beam into your ship or repair holes left by attacks/asteroids. You know there's a lot that could still be added or modified in this game and anything with this setting and emulation embedded really excites me.

Don't say that. I imagine there would eventually be an in game trade system which would allow anyone to buy ships and turrets with DCPU-16 software preinstalled.

The whole thing sounds to me like a scheme for transforming smart kids into proper nerds who write assembly and know their P from their I from their D. I like it.

Thank you. I was rather disheartened reading these comments. People are apparently planning on using this game to validate that they have holier than thou intellects over the general populace of gamers. My hope for this game is that it attracts the FPS gamers with its exploration mode and after a while they want to know more about how to program their DCPU-16 and awaken a thirst for knowledge inside them. Of course, that's a hope and may not be reality but I think Notch was alluding to that when he said:

It has a strange Quake-like quality to it: slightly too fast. I think it could be entertaining on LAN play but I don’t think you want to play it over the internet because with latency it’s going to become very unfair because it’s so fast. The goal still is to get it so that you can have a ship with the computer components in. Because then not only can you try the game but the people who want to build stuff for the computer can actually start doing that – it actually has some utility as well.

Basically I imagine the bullies in The Simpsons beating Notch up after they learn that he tricked them into learning.

Or you could stop being thick headed and stop expecting the summary to contain the entire article in full. It's already 7 lines long, and it's obvious to anyone with a brain that Mojang is a game company while reading the summary. Does it really matter that they made Minecraft? It's not hard to figure that out from the article, and it changes nothing about the content of it either.

Eldavojohn assumes that you're been around this year, instead of hidden under a rock. He probably also assumes you're capable of clicking the article if you're so interested in it that you have to bash the fact that it didn't contain every detail about Notch.